Managing redundant security alerts is costing businesses: FireEye

By David Braue

CSO|

Australian companies are losing a significant amount of time dealing with what has been estimated to be up to 150 redundant security alerts per day, according to recent figures from security firm FireEye.

In the company's recent survey of organisations across 13 countries, more than a third of Australian respondents were spending at least 200 hours reviewing security alerts every month, and nearly a quarter of respondents said they were receiving over 10,000 security alerts per month.

Of these, more than half of the companies surveyed said they were responding to redundant alerts at least 25 percent of the time, while 38 percent of respondents said that a quarter to half of their alerts were redundant.

For 5.9 percent of respondents, three in four security alerts were rated as being redundant.

This high rate of redundant notifications translates into significant lost time and money, since each alert requires manual review and follow-up of any potential issues that are identified.

“In some cases, Australian businesses are experiencing tens of thousands of security alerts every month and IT teams that are already stretched need to review every single one of these,” said Rich Costanzo, systems engineering lead with FireEye Australia and New Zealand in a statement.

“Not only could this flood of notifications lead to severe business consequences if malicious alerts slip through the cracks, but with many IT teams struggling to keep their heads above water, these alerts could go unchecked for days and increase the risk to the business.”

With security alert volumes showing no signs of stopping – 70 percent of Australian respondents said they were seeing more or the same level of alerts as 24 months ago – Costanzo believes the case for outsourcing the task to managed security providers has never been stronger: outsourcing alert monitoring “greatly improves the chance of answering the critical alerts quickly,” he said.

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